Amorphous materials and disordered systems such as glasses are ubiquitous in everyday life, yet our fundamental understanding of them is limited. To some extent, the discovery and fabrication of many commonly used amorphous materials still follow the practice from the age of alchemy. In this talk, I will show that the coherent scattering from an x-ray free electron laser (FEL) such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC, provides the key observables, i.e., ultrafast correlations, that allow a detailed comparison between experiments and theory or simulations.
My talk will cover both the methodology and instrumentation development that has taken place at the LCLS during the past decade. They are culminating in a technique that is going to be revolutionized by LCLS-II-HE, a megahertz x-ray FEL. It will finally enable studying dynamics and processes at the material limit, revealing mysteries such as the glass transition, which is viewed by many as “one of the deepest and most important unsolved problems in condensed matter physics.” With the exciting capability on the horizontal, I will layout a research program at the LCLS, aimed at harnessing its coherence towards building a liquid and glass observatory, with wide applications to both synthetic and biological systems, critical to technology and even life.
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Michael Peskin, Riti Sarangi
